The Animation Show at The IFC Center

Premieres Friday, July 25, at The IFC Center Image via: Trevor Jimenez

If close to an hour and a half of three minute animated shorts sounds demanding on its audience, let me be the first to confirm those suspicions. I witnessed this just last week at The Animation Show press screening, a film comprised of Mike Judge’s favorite independent animation shorts. It’s doubtful too much could have been done to avoid the obvious challenges presented by show asking its viewers to focus on a feature length film made up of shorts meant to sustain a viewers attention for a fraction of that time, though certainly the fact that I found only three of over twenty five films excellent, didn’t help. Don’t get me wrong, most of this shorts weren’t bad — though I certainly could have done without Usavich; rabbit like figures and their tiresome adventures in a car — they were simply worth about the amount of time they ran. Animations exceeding those expectations include, Grant Orchard’s, Love Sport Paint Balling, a film that engages the art cliche paint splatter, without becoming a Michael Israel production, This Way Up, by Smith and Foulkes, an animation featuring gorgeous wash backgrounds and detailed foreground figures who make a treacherous trip to bury the dead, and Angry Unpaid Hooker, a an amusing short about a emo-hipster who hires a hooker. Other notables include, Trevor Jimenez ‘s Key Lime Pie, Matthew Walker’s Operator, and Bill Plympton’s Hot Dog.